Monthly Archives: June 2016

I grew up in southeastern Kentucky near Straight Creek, a body of water with bends and curves that contradicted its name. My friends and I often waded in its placid waters, hunting for crawdads as the heat bugs sang a steady chorus in the brambles and treetops. But the creek…

In the introduction to her debut short story collection Blackberries, Blackberries, celebrated fiction writer Crystal Wilkinson drew a strong connection between two parts of her identity. “Being country,” she wrote, “is as much a part of me as my full lips, wide hips, dreadlocks and high cheekbones. There are many…

“Still has some spring to it,” the seller says as he pushes in the sides of the oval, “you can have it for free. I can’t sell it to you.” I take the sour dough he selects from six left in the bushel basket, clasp it and make for the…

February 23, 2016 Lorde, who would have turned 82 last Thursday. If she had not died in that year of the rising Clintons, 1992. If she had not battled for 14 years before that breast cancer liver cancer For 58 years before that the cancer of a disappearing mother the…

In the car it was steamy, smoky. The heat on and off, the indows rolled up, then cracked, the smoke from Roger’s cigarette flowing out in a thin stream. The stuffiness was the kind that made Evie carsick, the warm queasy air pressing on her. She could remember riding the…

You’ve already forgotten why you’ve come. Why you left the mountains to be swallowed whole by kudzu, to become a wanderer in a desert of hand-scrawled signs, each one a temptation or a prayer: Watermellons. Stop. Tomatos. Here. There is no one place, only places scattered along the falling highway,…

Fenton Johnson. The Man Who Loved Birds. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 318 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. In The Man Who Loved Birds, Fenton Johnson returns to his native landscape in the Kentucky Knobs to revisit themes he has explored in past works—love, the law and the lawless, spirituality,…